#PublicArt. This is the best term for it, not statues or street art, because the public is involved, so you know you gotta think about the public response - intended and incidental - as well as the artist's intention.

Older public art is particularly interesting because of change. Mostly - but not always - the artist's intentions don't change over time, but the public's reaction certainly does.

#TrafalgarSquare is a good example. It was built 180 years ago or so. Later than you might think, but earlier than I expected. It commemorates a naval battle of the #NapoleonicWars, but it wasn't originally going to - they were going to call it #WilliamIV Square or something. The theme changed from #royalism to #militarism, but that change isn't visible in the statues.

After 1815 and before about 1880, the #BritishEmpire was mainly #India, the #WestIndies, #Ireland, and an archipelago of #navy bases dotted around the world. The #UnitedKingdom was figuring out how to deal with its #democratic deficit, so there were a series of reactionary governments that paradoxically passed #ReformBills to extend the franchise. There were #labour riots, and an #industrial boom, and huge cities - particularly #London, but also #Manchester, #Birmingham, #Liverpool, #Belfast - growing like galloping weeds over the countryside. This was #Dickens 's England. This was the time of #TheMakingOfTheEnglishWorkingClass.

So what did they mean at the time by building Trafalgar Square? It has #propaganda value. Lord #Nelson was a controversial figure in his own time, but I can imagine the Duke of #Wellington trying to link his own political fortunes to a safely-dead hero in the 1830s. The square was built with #parliamentary approval and funding, and with quite a lot of public subscription too - though what a 'public' means in that context isn't obvious. Probably wealthy #industrialists, the #techbros of the age, but I'm guessing.

Since it was built, more - but much smaller - naval commemorations have been added. So its original goals weren't forgotten, but extended - artist intentionality changing over time.

The #Suffragettes used Trafalgar Square extensively for protests. I think we can reasonably link their use of the square to the original political use of the square. It was built in an era of Reform Bills that didn't reform the vote for #women. They could hardly do better than to make their protest clear in a space which modeled the thing they were protesting about - a powerful, militarist, partly-democratic England that didn't include women.

#Labour also used Trafalgar Square for protests. One of my favourite photos is of #KeirHardy - the Keir who the current prime minister is named for - speaking from the base of #NelsonsColumn in 1908. You have to know about it, but Trafalgar Square is a labour monument.

And to this day, Trafalgar Square is a traditional rally point for demonstrations and protests. No important London protest or demo happens without going through Trafalgar Square.

This use of their commemorative art would be totally alien to people who funded its construction. They're more likely to have been the backers of the #PeterlooMassacre.

The square was famously sandbagged during the Second World War, to preserve it from being damaged, and I gather many Londoners at the time considered that to be symbolic of resistance and survival. So the art became invisible to the public, but people were still aware of it.

These days, Trafalgar Square is a landmark of London, in many ways as iconic and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. That might please its builders, but probably wasn't what they expected. It's also a rendezvous point, with its tube station and its buses. A gathering place. It hosts incidental modern art on the famous empty plinth.

Public art is inspirational. This is just Trafalgar Square - all the things I've seen give me the shivers when I think about how much embattled history is locked up in stone and bronze, under which people eat sandwiches, kiss lovers, wave placards, make speeches, and which get periodic paint douses, get stood on, relabeled and reinterpreted, dressed up and eventually pulled down.

Another time I'll write about other public art I've seen. #StPetersburg and #Moscow are rather heavy on such art, but there is so much important stuff to say about it.